LABOR QUOTES III
quotations about labor
Our experience tells us what is labour and recreation.
EDWARD COUNSEL
Maxims
Providence has decreed that those common acquisitions, money, gems, plate, noble mansions, and dominion, should be sometimes bestowed on the indolent and unworthy; but those things which constitute our true riches, and which are properly our own, must be procured by our own labor.
ERASMUS
attributed, Day's Collacon
The truth beyond the fetish's glimmering mirage is the relationship of laborer to product; it is the social account of how that object came to be. In this view every commodity, beneath the mantle of its price tag, is a hieroglyph ripe for deciphering, a riddle whose solution lies in the story of the worker who made it and the conditions under which it was made.
LEAH HAGER COHEN
Glass, Paper, Beans: Revolutions on the Nature and Value of Ordinary Things
To assert that labor is not the destiny of man, and that it cannot become for him a source of happiness, is to calumniate the Creator.
C. VIGOUREUX
attributed, Day's Collacon
But every acquisition that is disproportionate to the labor spent on it is dishonest.
LEO TOLSTOY
Anna Karenina
Communism deprives no man of the ability to appropriate the fruits of his labour. The only thing it deprives him of is the ability to enslave others by means of such appropriations.
KARL MARX
The Communist Manifesto
He who lives upon the fruit of his own labor, escapes the contempt of haughty benefactors.
SAADI
attributed, Day's Collacon
I have two problems with hard labor: hard and labor.
JAROD KINTZ
$3.33
How happy he who crowns in shades like these, A youth of labour with an age of ease.
OLIVER GOLDSMITH
The Deserted Village
It has been said "that he who works prays;" and certainly one of the best prayers that a working man with a large and young family can offer up is to steadily stick to his work. Jesus Christ, the Son of God, the Saviour of the world, was the son of a working carpenter, and it is believed by many Theologians that our Saviour followed that trade (whatever it was in those days) until he was thirty years of age. If then God's only Son, the right hand of the throne of heaven, the King of men, the only sinless, spotless, perfect child, youth, and man, was a labourer, IS THERE NOT DIGNITY IN LABOUR? The happiest man is the working man, and if there is any real happiness in this world it is in the neat but humble cottage, where peace and love reign, and the industrious wife is the true helpmate of the working man; and not in the palace, where the bloated aristocrat, recovering from an attack of gout or some other punishment for excess, sits, trying to kill time, with bleared eyes (and often of idiotic expression) gazing into vacancy, surrounded by all that wealth can buy or human ingenuity contrive to make him comfortable, but with all not happy.
T. AUGUSTUS FORBES LEITH
"On the Dignity of Labour", Short Essays
Labor in all its variety, corporeal and mental, is the instituted means for the methodical development of all our powers, under the direction and control of will.
JOSIAH GILBERT HOLLAND
Gold-Foil
Under the regime of property, labor is not a condition, but a privilege.
PIERRE-JOSEPH PROUDHON
What is Property?
What is acquired without labor is seldom worth acquiring at all.
ANNE RADCLIFFE
attributed, Day's Collacon
It is to labor, and to labor only, that man owes everything possessed of exchangeable value. Labor is the talisman that has raised him from the condition of the savage: that has changed the desert and the forest into cultivated fields; that has covered the earth with cities, and the ocean with ships; that has given us plenty, comfort, and elegance, instead of want, misery, and barbarism.
JOHN RAMSAY MCCULLOCH
The Principles of Political Economy
Labour, though it was at first inflicted as a curse, seems to be the gentlest of all punishments, and is fruitful of a thousand blessings.
JOHN ROGERS PITMAN
"Goodness of God", A Second Course of Sermons for the Year
The general tendency towards an eight-hour working day has undoubtedly been healthful, and it is wise for the State to set a good example as an employer of labor, both as to the number of hours of labor exacted and as to paying a just and reasonable wage.
THEODORE ROOSEVELT
memorandum filed with Assembly Bill number 2222 entitled "An Act to amend chapter four hundred and fifteen of the laws of eighteen hundred and ninety-seven, entitled 'An Act in relation to labor'"
There can be no general prosperity where labor has small reward.
LEWIS F. KORNS
Thoughts
There is an abandonment, an escape, that physical labor bestows.
STEVEN GOULD
Jumper
I believe in the dignity of labor, whether with head or hand; that the world owes no man a living but that it owes every man an opportunity to make a living.
JOHN D. ROCKEFELLER
remarks at the 75th Anniversary Celebration of Fisk University, Nashville, Tenn., "To Men of Vision and High Purpose", May 3, 1941
In proportion as labor is divided, arts are perfected.
ARISTOTLE
Politics